Staff Reporter

Back in college, our gang of characters decided to make a trip up north to Canada for some sport fishing and maybe a little hunting. Getting the information from Doug Hensley on the current elk hunt got me thinking back to a much more innocent and intoxicating time when all of a sudden heading off to another country took all of a few hours to pack, plan and get on the road. (Packing first was the key to actually going before better heads prevailed.)

Oh yeh, on the road again. And this time we packed well. We got our cooler for our “cold pops” and then we needed another cooler for our food. The cases of cold pops took up an entire Igloo cooler. And I know there’s some guys and gals out there that have strategically packed a cooler plum full of cans who know what I’m talking about. This is an art I still can master.

Then we got some clothes together and made sure to pack layers to keep warm. My friend just happened to have his shotgun and of course I had mine, so those were no-brainers if we really wanted to hunt. We really wanted to fish, so our poles and all the other stuff we had for fishing in the big city went as well.

Sounded like a great idea to us. Little did we know those darned Canadians had their own rules on firearms that it didn’t include our beloved Second Amendment. Young and dumb; some of the best fun you’ll ever have.

So we’ve made the entire trip up through Indiana and the lower part of Michigan and are at the end of the line. We’re in the upper reaches of our country and are getting ready to cross over, eh.

We picked a busy crossing point and thought there would be no problem when the lady looked at us and asked, “You boys aren’t in any militias are you?” Nope. Negative on that one.

“Do you have any guns in all that stuff?” Uh, yep. That there is a positive.

“Care to pull over here and let us check them out?” Naw. That’s fine with us. Just a couple shotguns.

Well, after the lady went and got four of her best clad friends with guns of their own, it didn’t take long before our truck was in pieces. They went from just looking at the hillbillies all decked out in cammo and boots to taking us off into separate rooms for interrogations. (We found out later they found a bullet of which they didn’t approve.)

We were asked question after question for quite some time about our affiliations, our known aliases and all other sorts of crimes and misdemeanors.

Too bad I didn’t and still don’t have a good nickname. It would have been great to tell them, “They call me tater salad, or at least something like booger.”

But jokes were out of the question. My friend did get in a few about our cartoon friend Dudley Dooright. They didn’t take kind to those at all.

Pretty much, the story ends up with us back at an Indian casino in northern Michigan playing roulette. But get this. The dealer, he was from Blackey, Kentucky.

What a world. We get kicked out of Canada just for being stupid and end up on the outskirts of nowhere inside a faux-wood looking, plastic teepee full of drunk white men where one of the workers used to pretty much be our neighbor. And all this is during our spring break.

Only in America. And almost Canada, eh.